Just a daft question. "The 10Gbit switch will become part of a very high speed SETI spectrometer to be deployed at the Greenbank Telescope." I assume that this helps SETI@Home in some way? Because there is no explanation as to what this does.

It's part of a highly advanced SERENDIP system we've been working on for implementation at the Greenbank Telescope.

The spectrometer uses a polyphase filter bank (PFB) to implement a bank of steep cut-off bandpass filters, providing a significant improvement in signal-to-noise and out-of-band-rejection over the common FFT algorithm. The PFB uses a biplex pipelined architecture which allows data to be input and output at the full sample rate, and can do two polarizations simultaneously with no extra cost in hardware or data flow rate.

The above is in addition to applications in SETI, FX correlators, pulsar, and general radio astronomy.

In even briefer summary: more science, faster, with less noise. SETI will also have a data recorder attached for S&H applications per my understanding, though I couldn't tell you for certain without seeing more specs than I have. We've been working on smaller parts of the pie which is probably for the best.
____________

Unfortunately we haven't garnered any new donations today for drives so far. If you'd like to help us take advantage of Newegg's sale on these drives (and thusly save the project around $1200), please visit the links below

Currently we only need 23.8 more drives and each $70 donated is another drive for the project.

We found out yesterday that the project specs for our Hydrogen Survey / SETI Storage Array changed. Turns out the array will be more beneficial to the project if it houses 40 2TB drives vs 40 1TB drives. As a result, istead of 1TB drives, we'll be purchasing 2TB drives now, specifically these drives http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145473

Unfortunately the project specs changed after 15 1TB drives had already shipped. While this isn't a big deal in that these 15 drives are on their way to being processed by Newegg's RMA feature, it is a bit of a delay. Once these 15 drives are refunded to us, we'll be purchasing all of the 2TB drives we have funds for at that time.

Here's where we stand right now:

Total funds needed: $4800
Total funds raised: $1700.33

We've updated the totals of the pool as well as our Donate - A - Drive totals per drive.

I apologize for the sudden change of specs but in the end 2TB drives will make the array much more powerful. Additionally using 2TB vs the original 1TB drives will reduce the cost per GB to SETI by half while giving us more storage space for project data to boot.

Just bought another 5 drives. That should at least get us past the 12 that Eric needed for the Hydrogen survey. Slavic can you give us an update of how many drives we're up to when you get a moment. Thanks.

Just bought another 5 drives. That should at least get us past the 12 that Eric needed for the Hydrogen survey. Slavic can you give us an update of how many drives we're up to when you get a moment. Thanks.

MarkJ

Will do just as soon as the last RMA comes through (should be Tuesday). Thank you Mark, you're amazing!
____________

Just bought another 5 drives. That should at least get us past the 12 that Eric needed for the Hydrogen survey. Slavic can you give us an update of how many drives we're up to when you get a moment. Thanks.

MarkJ

Will do just as soon as the last RMA comes through (should be Tuesday). Thank you Mark, you're amazing!

Okay here's where we are with the project currently:

1. Total needed $4800. Raised $2390 which equates to just shy of 20 drives which is excellent.

2. Here's what Eric wrote about what we'll be doing with these drives:

- The distribution will be closer to 50-50 between SETI drives and Hydrogen drives after some retooling.
- All drives will be in one machine.
- We will start with 25TB available for hydrogen and 43TB available for SETI online data/backup.
- This will probably end up at 36TB for Hydrogen and 32TB for SETI.
- If this storage system works out well we'll be replacing the labs current system which is currently costing $200/mo/TB for SETI storage and is rarely used due to the high cost.
- Additionally if our plan pans out we'll end up likely populating another 24 drive enclosure with 2TB drives which will significantly improve our storage capabilities while at the same time significantly reducing overhead costs, freeing up funds for other improvements in other areas.

3. All we're waiting on right now is for the last RMA to be finalized on Tuesday then we'll purchase however many drives we have funds for them which will let Eric get the ball rolling on his project.

Thanks to Mark and Tbret's recent donations along with Eric managing to acquire 4 drives with the same specs, we can fill out 24 slots of the enclosure with our Tuesday order and get the project off the ground.

As other donors contribute the last 16 drives, we'll ship them over and populate the remaining slots in the enclosure.
____________

1. The new Brocade 10GBE switch, which will be a large part of the new high speed spectrometer mounted at the GBT will be installed in Oct/Nov. Currently we're waiting on a few additional components to show up before we are able to are able to get the switch hooked up.

Once we get it installed and tested we'll be evaluating the functionality of the new 10GBE switch and planning out another, even beefier switch for a similar project.

2. We've ordered 20 of the drives for Eric's Hydrogen / SETI Storage array. These should be delivered tomorrow (Thursday). These 20 drives along with 4 drives he found will be enough for us to fill up the internal slots on our array and allow Eric to get to work utilizing the array. We still need 16 drives to finish out the external slots, so please help us out by donating a drive or 16 by visiting the links below.

3. Got word today from Matt that our 2 workstations that were crippled in the earlier power fluctuations are up and running at full speed now. Good news :)

4. The closet switch has been installed as of today. It will take a bit of time to slowly incorporate the new switch given that they have to physically move all of the processes from the old switch to our new one. They also have to do a bit of shuffling of the rack units in order to make space for the new switch and connections. With that said this is a fairly high priority task, so expect the switch to be installed, according to Matt, "Sooner than later."

5. From Matt on what GeorgeM and PaddyM are up to, and what the Lab has planned for them:

Both georgem and paddym have been working great, though georgem had been blocked up a bit as we were using it as a temporary storage for Kepler data. A large chunk of that finally finished copying off yesterday so I was able reclaim some space/functionality. The rest of the Kepler data should be off in a couple days. Anyway, they are still pretty much georgem: workunit storage, compute server, and file server and paddym: master science database. I'm not sure if we can add more functionality to paddym as the science database is pretty much a full time job, but georgem still might adopt various BOINC server functionality over time (upload server, download server, scheduling server, internal BOINC back-end server...).

I think that you have to do some work on your donation tracking pages so that they reflect the actual status of the projects.

With 24 of 40 drives done the Hydrogen Survey / SETI Storage Array project is 60% finished. But on the donation tracking pages it looks very much different. With 240 of 4800 dollars done the project looks to be only 5% finished.

I think that you have to do some work on your donation tracking pages so that they reflect the actual status of the projects.

With 24 of 40 drives done the Hydrogen Survey / SETI Storage Array project is 60% finished. But on the donation tracking pages it looks very much different. With 240 of 4800 dollars done the project looks to be only 5% finished.

Also, I can't find any page listing the cash-for-hardware donations.

I've updated the donation total tracker this morning. We're at $1860 to go total on the hydrogen/SETI storage drive fundraiser.

Quick question, I clicked on the Newegg link to the drives, and thought I would take a look at how they are doing in the real world. It listed the reviews from newest to oldest, and I was shocked at what I saw. Of the 1st 20 or so that I read, (till around 6/1/12) all I kept seeing was dead, dying, arrived destroyed, lasted only hours/days/weeks, etc. If you haven't opened or installed them yet, you may want to do a little more checking into these, maybe to spend a little more $ and get a (hopefully) higher quality more enterprise level drive? The main reason I'm suggesting this is that we have had our share of HW issues over the years, and it seems that we may be setting ourselves up for more self inflicted heartburn due to drive failures. I know that more people write to complain than compliment, but the product reviews are a good way to get at least an idea of what is currently happening with a product. Please check it out and see what you guys think. I'm all for donating, I have in the past and plan to again in the future. I just want the money to be used wisely, and sometimes the best priced isn't the best value.

*edit* I did a quick search, the Western Digital Caviar Black WD2002FAEX 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive didn't seem to have nearly as many bad reviews, plus a 5 year warranty. Only downside is they are more expensive... Just a thought.
____________

One other that looked like it might fit the bill, if your enclosure could handle it, was a ST32000645SS Constellation 2TB SAS ES.2 6GB S 7200RPM 64M 3.5 Bare drive. Provantage has a better deal on them, and the interface is much more enterprise level. :) http://www.provantage.com/seagate-st32000645ss~7SEGS2CV.htm Just a thought, and they are the same price!
____________

We were given a specific set of specs for this project (make, manuf, specs). If it had been my choice we would've gone with a different drive, but then again even the previously rock solid Seagates are giving us major issues.

With that said we have a 3 year warranty on these drives and if they do turn up sour, we can easily RMA them for new drives.
____________

Very true, and hopefully they'll run some sort of validation utility on each of them before creating the array. The best part is that it is an array, so unless a number of them go down at nearly the same time, there should be time for the replacement. I was reading that there was a little bit of a time lag to get the replacement via the warranty (I think I read 2 weeks was the turnaround for one unlucky purchaser), so they may want to try configuring one or 2 of them as hot spares, and maybe even set the goal to 41 drives, so you can have one on the shelf to throw in at a moments notice, just in case. I'm really curious to know how they all play out, from reading the discouraging reviews. Can you ask the team if they could keep track of the issues these drives present? It may help the rest of us out here in making HD purchasing decisions depending on their experiences. Thanks much, keep up the good work! Go Team Green Stars! ;-)
____________

Just had another drive donated. We're down to 15 total needed to finish this project. Thank you!

I know donating a hard drive isn't as sexy as building a server, but it's just as vital to the infrastructure of SETI as the aforementioned servers. For example:

Since our inception, our donors have donated hard drives which are currently:
1. Transporting data between the GBT and Arecibo (2 and 3TB drives) in massive quantities.
2. Housed in our JBOD which is holding GBT data for in house processing and several RAIDS critical to SETI.
3. Residing inside PaddyM, GeorgeM and Synergy
4. Meeting the storage requirements for Eric's Hydrogen survey and SETI data storage.
5. Residing in our two donated workstations which are partially hosting the SETI website.

Please help us out by donating a drive or part of a drive by visiting the links below:

I assume that this helps SETI@Home in some way? Because there is no explanation as to what this does.

Explanation... must-read. New 'scope, new receiver, new project coming online in about 5 months as part of SETI@Home. I'm raising funds for it in the other pinned thread.

Edit: Didn't see this thread had a second page. :^) It's been answered already.
____________“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”--- Margaret Mead

Thanks to last weekend, we've cleared our plate for fundraisers which leaves us wide open for new projects.

We're currently waiting for final specs for a new server. This server will be specifically slated to do nothing but replace our two remaining old upload and download servers. Once completed this should stop our issues with trying to find a good server/bad server. when getting work.

I'm also working on getting the project a load balancer donated which, unlike our faulty software based load balancing, should actually go a long way in fixing our upload and download issues, especially the hung connections and instant retries.

So in short, we're focusing solely on fixing our work unit flow issues right now. Once our new project specs come through I'll set us up a new fundraiser, close this thread and open a new one. Thanks for your interest everyone!
____________